Sra: Imagine It!, Themes, Taking a Stand, Ancient Civilizations Ecology, Great Expectations, Earth in Action, Art and Impact, Level 6

How does the chart help you learn about dancers who borrowed from other cultures?

Do you think dance is unique in its cultural borrowing? Why or why not?

Research a famous dance step, such as the jitterbug or the Charleston, and see what its cultural influences are.

Try It!

As you work on your investigation, think about how you can use charts to organize your information.

* overrated

* predictable

* palette

* triumph

* labored

* scale

* optically

* technical

* intimacy

* unsparing

Vocabulary Strategy

I keep promising myself I will pay no attention to the hype surrounding new art gallery shows. Once again, I broke my promise.

I was not planning to review Paul Humbel's show at Gallery 13. I have always thought Humbel was an overrated artist. However, I decided to ignore the lessons of the past. I wanted to see for myself. Based on my prior experiences with Humbel's work, though, it was predictable that I would be let down.

A poster outside the gallery shows Humbel holding a brush and his palette . The poster boasts of the artist's " triumph. " However, the poster exaggerates his talent. In the opinion of this reviewer, the show is yet another failure.

Humbel had labored for six months on his newest portrait. Its massive scale and vivid background colors make it optically overwhelming. Unfortunately, the emotional impact is zero.
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The title of the portrait is "The Soprano." I could find no fault with the technical details of the painting. Yet, in spite of the artist's technical skill, he gives viewers no intimacy with his subject.

In a good portrait, viewers feel as if they know the subject. They have a sense of who the subject is. By contrast, the soprano does not seem like someone who has ever lived or breathed. The pupils of her eyes are black caves where nothing exists.

More disturbing is that Humbel's soprano looks incapable of humming a tune, let alone having sung an aria. Whatever Humbel wants to say about art or music is a mystery to this reviewer.

The rest of his paintings are even less impressive. They are no more than mere duplicates of the artist's earlier work. My advice is to give this show a pass. In the future, I hope Humbel receives the unsparing criticism that he deserves.

Game

Concept Vocabulary

The concept word for this lesson is constraint. Constraint means "a restriction or limitation." What types of constraints are put on artists? How does constraint connect with the theme Art and Impact?

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by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan

Genre

A biography is the story of a real person's life that is told by another person.

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Focus Questions

What is groundbreaking about Chuck Close's art? How have Close's disabilities affected his art?

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Chuck Close is one of the most respected artists of his time. His stature in the art world would come as a surprise to those who knew Close while he was growing up in Tacoma, Washington. Unrecognized learning disabilities resulted in Close being thought of as undisciplined and unpromising as a student. However, Close worked hard to overcome his disabilities and was eventually accepted at the Yale University School of Art. With discipline and skill, he began finding his voice as an artist in spite of the roadblocks-- mental, physical, and self-imposed--put before him.

"Sneaking Up on It"

Chuck is talking with a group of art students in his SoHo studio. They ask how an artist chooses his subjects. What style to paint in? What color to use? He tells them: "If you formed a rock band, you'd know that you don't want to sound like this person or that person because you've spent thousands of hours listening to music. How can you decide what to paint without looking at thousands of paintings? There are no shortcuts. Every time I see a painting by somebody else it becomes part of the way I understand art. And I think 'Wow! That's something I don't have to do.'"

Close's teachers always told him he had a "good hand." He explains this to mean both some technical ability and the knack of making "art that looks like art." In other words, he could paint in the traditional, accepted styles. "In college I made the same shapes and color combinations over and over again because I'd learned which ones looked most like 'art.' I was very good at mimicking other artists. In fact I couldn't get their work out of my head, particularly when I respected them."

Imitating other painters is part of learning to be an artist. But at some point a serious artist develops his or her own style. For Chuck, this involved years of experimentation. After Yale he lived in Europe on a Fulbright grant. Then he came back to the United States and started teaching at the University of Massachusetts. "The first year I was an artist who taught. The second year I was a teacher who also painted. I wanted to be a painter. It was time to get on with it."

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Watercolor on paper mounted on canvas. 72½ × 57 inches.

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Chuck had gone through many different styles, including mixed media constructions made from cardboard, magazine photographs, and wedding pictures. But he needed to move forward, to "try something really drastic." To rid himself of his predictable painting habits, he threw away his familiar brushes and assembled a new set of tools: an airbrush, sponges, rags, and even an eraser stuck to the end of an electric drill.

He had attempted to make each part of the figure equally important, but there were too many areas to focus on. Some were naturally more compelling than others. In addition, the scale wasn't big enough. "I wanted the viewer to get lost in the painting." It wasn't practical to blow up the figure to a larger size when it was already twenty-two feet long. "What is the first feature most people look at when they meet someone?" he asked himself. The head. What about a giant head?

He happened to have some film left in his camera, so he stood in front of it and photographed himself. He stared straight into the lens as if he were taking a mug shot or a passport photo.

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Ink and felt tip on collaged photograph with masking tape.

The grid divides the photograph into many thousands of small squares. The artist translates the information for each of these squares onto the canvas.

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Chuck Close. Big Self-Portrait (detail). 1968.

Acrylic on canvas. 107½ × 83½ inches.

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He made his painting as truthful as he could, even though the gigantic scale meant the imperfections of his face were magnified. He said he'd never considered the fact that his nostrils were shaped like lima beans, but in the four months it took him to paint the picture he had plenty of time to think about it.

Day by day he could tell the painting felt right. This was what he'd been looking for: a concept of self-imposed rules that would form the basis for future work.

What is revolutionary about this self-portrait? The large scale, the unsparing detail that forces the viewer to see the subject matter in a new way. The painting becomes a topographical map of a face with each freckle charted. The familiarity of two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a chin is magnified into a question. Is this what we look like?

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Between 1967 and 1970 Close painted seven more of the huge paintings. Their sheer aggressive size made them hard to ignore when they were first exhibited. But people were also amazed by Chuck's technique. His secret tool was the airbrush (a kind of sophisticated spray gun). "I used black paint that was thinned down, very watery. I scraped it. I erased it and sprayed more paint on. Slowly I sneaked up on it. In fact the whole series of black-and-white paintings was made with one sixty-cent tube of Mars black liquid paint."

Gigantic. Smooth surface. Cool. Gray. Precise. Deadpan. Dazed. Quiet. Wordless. Every inch of the face is revealed. You can count the eyelashes. The pupils are larger than Ping-Pong balls.

In 1969 Close was invited to join an art gallery and to include his work in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum, probably the most prestigious group show for a young artist. In 1970 he had his first one-man show. Within five years his paintings were being exhibited from New York to Tokyo. The startling and original works had taken the art world by storm.

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Close says, "The greatest enemy for an artist is ease ... repeating yourself once you get good at it." To keep his painting from becoming too "easy," he sets obstacles for himself. He calls it "putting rocks in my shoes."

"I think problem-solving is highly overrated. Problem creation is much more interesting. If you want to react personally you have to move away from other people's ideas. You have to back yourself into your own corner where no one else's solutions apply and ask yourself to behave as an individual."

The giant black-and-white paintings had been strikingly fresh in the late 1960s. Now he was ready to create another "problem" for himself -- a new challenge. Around 1970 he invited some friends over to pose for a different set of "head shots," this time in color. He says there is a big advantage to using photographs. "If you paint from life, you have to do more than one sitting. The models gain weight, lose weight; their hair gets long; they cut it off. They're happy; they're sad. They're asleep or they're awake. But the camera provides the freshness and intimacy of one moment frozen in time."

Oil on canvas.

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Chuck Close. John. 1971-1972.

Acrylic on gessoed canvas. 100 × 90 inches.

a. unpainted beard.

b. beard with red layer.

c. beard with red and blue layers.

d. beard with red, blue, and yellow layers.

e. finished painting.

First the artist paints the red layer. Over the red he paints the same picture again, this time in blue. At last he paints the yellow layer. When these primary colors are mixed together in various degrees of intensity, they make up all the colors of the spectrum, from pinkish skin tones to midnight blue.

To keep himself from making "the same old colors" on his palette, he found a way to mix the color directly on the canvas. Since color photo images are made up of three primary hues -- red, blue, and yellow -- he had the photographs separated into these three colors. Then he began to paint.

The task was slow and painstaking. It took fourteen months to complete one picture because each one was painted three times, one color on top of another.

Moving around such large canvases proved backbreaking. So he built a portable desk and chair on the prongs of a forklift called Big Joe. By pulling on a rope, he could raise or lower himself to reach the whole canvas, from the bottom to the top. On Big Joe were his paints, a television, a telephone, a radio. While he painted all day, he listened to news and talk shows. As he put the last touches on a painting, he turned on an Aretha Franklin tape to celebrate.
The artist, seated on Big Joe, painting Jud, 1982.

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Chuck Close. Georgia. 1984.

Fingerpainting, oil on canvas. 48 × 38 inches.

In another series Close made paintings without using brushes. His tools were his fingerprints, sometimes just his thumb rubbed in stamp-pad ink. "I like using the body as a tool for painting. In a funny way you usually have to feel through a brush, through a pencil. But there's this object between the body and the surface of the canvas. By using my hands, I can feel just how much ink is on my finger, and then I can feel very clearly how much I'm depositing on the painting. This makes the ink easier to control." If you look at the background of this tender painting of his daughter Georgia, you can make out the artist's fingerprints in various colors.

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Even though he was now painting in color, Close hadn't given up black and white. Fanny was painted in his familiar hyperrealistic way with every fold and wrinkle of her face visible, but instead of the airbrush he built the image out of broken chunks of fingerprints. The surface has become soft, feathery, and mysterious. The fingerprints look rubbed, not crisp. From a distance you can't tell what method the artist used. Descriptive words that come to mind are wrinkled, gentle, warm, kind, weathered, and wise.

Fingerpainting, oil on canvas. 102 × 84 inches.

"Fanny, my wife's grandmother, was a person who had tremendous tragedy in her life. She was the only survivor from her whole large family in World War Two. Given her experiences, it's amazing that she remained a very optimistic, lovely person. And both of those conditions are clearly present in her face."

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At three or four feet the individual dots of color that make up Lucas II are clear. They could be extra-large pixels on a color television or computer screen. If you prop up this open book and move away, your eyes will blend the dots. The confetti dots of crimson, green, azure, purple, and white merge into skin, hair, and eyes. With each step back the painting changes.

Now imagine walking into a gallery and being confronted by the actual painting of Lucas II . It is smaller than many of Close's heads--only three feet high--but its power dominates the room. His eyes drill into you. His hair crackles with electricity.

The starburst of color sucks you into a swirling vortex. Imagine a spaceship accelerating into hyperspace. On the other hand the painting also seems to radiate out, pulsing with an almost musical beat. Some descriptive words are speed, authority, explosion. If the head could talk, it would shout a command, not a polite request: "Do it now!" or "Follow me!"

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Chuck Close. Lucas II. 1987.

Oil on canvas. 36 × 30 inches.

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"The Event"

Chuck is busy painting today. He's preparing for an exhibition and feels pressured. At the far end of the studio a tilted canvas rises out of a trapdoor in the floor. The Big Joe forklift has been retired. Now Chuck paints with a brush strapped to his arm. He works in his new way, dictated by what he matter-of-factly calls "the event," the event that changed his life.

"The event" happened in 1988, just before Christmas. Chuck was on the dais at the mayor's residence in New York City, facing a crowd of people. He was scheduled to give an art award but felt terrible, with a severe pain in his chest. He pleaded to be first on the program, quickly gave his speech, then staggered across the street to a hospital emergency room. Within a few hours he was paralyzed from the neck down.

At first the doctors didn't know why. Eventually they diagnosed a rare spinal artery collapse. Sometimes injuries like this happen to football players during rough games or to people who have been in accidents. Nobody could figure out how it happened to Chuck. But art and medical experts agreed on one point: His career was finished.
"I begin with one of the corners. After the squares are finished, I rotate the whole painting and go through it again.
Finally the canvas is turned to its upright position. I go through the painting one more time, correcting, editing, changing, pulling one square out, putting one in.
I'm always referring back to the photograph. It's like looking at a map so you don't get lost."

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Chuck Close. Lorna. 1995.

Oil on canvas. 102 × 84 inches.

Close knew better. He was alive, so he would continue to make art. But becoming a conceptual artist, counting on others to execute his ideas, didn't interest him. He yearned to get back to "the pure pleasure of pushing materials around, of getting into paint." The biggest question in his mind was how. "I was trapped in a body that didn't work, but somehow I was going to get the paint on canvas."

His wife, Leslie, understood and was determined to find a way. She encouraged him to move to Rusk Institute, a rehabilitation facility. "I was there for seven months. Besides my family and friends, the art world also really turned out for me. At the end of the day after physical therapy, I'd be lying there, and one visitor after another would appear at the foot of my bed. In the darkened room their faces loomed up. I realized just how important these disembodied images of heads were. It reconnected me. It was the first time I ever really accepted the fact that I was making portraits. Prior to that I'd always referred to my paintings as heads."

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Chuck Close. April. 1990-1991.

Oil on canvas. 100 × 84 inches.

He spent painful months in rehabilitation. Though he'd never worked out in a gym before, he went every day. Eventually he gained partial use of his arms and legs, but he could walk only a few steps. He'd be dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of his life. And even worse for an artist, he still couldn't move his hands.

He labored with weights, strengthening the muscles in his arms. Finally, after many long weeks of struggle, he developed a way to work. Seated in his wheelchair, with a brush strapped to his hand, he could put paint on a canvas. His arms took the place of his fingers.

"I used to like roughhousing on the grass with my kids, walking on the beach, or mowing the lawn. Since now there are many activities I can't do, painting has assumed a larger share of my time. I'm really left with my relationship with my work, my family, my friends, and other artists."

Along with the complete change in his life, Close's portraits took on a new dimension. Before "the event" he was already painting in a looser, freer style, but now the shapes of each square were like fireworks -- bursts of color. It was as if he were celebrating the sheer excitement of being able to paint again.

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A major leap! A triumph! A breakthrough, the critics would say. Close would simply say, "I was back to work."

Today Chuck Close is one of the most admired and successful artists in the world, with a hundred solo shows to his credit and a retrospective of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. How has he accomplished this? He says, "If you wait for inspiration, you'll never get anything done. When you look at my paintings, there is no way of knowing which days I was happy or which days I was sad, which days I was up or which days I was down. The important thing is getting into a rhythm and continuing it. It makes for a very positive experience. Every day when I roll out of the studio and look over my shoulder, I say, That's what I did today."
Chuck Close's studio, with Self-Portrait, 1997.

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Jan Greenberg

Sandra Jordan

Jordan worked as a photographer and editor before partnering with Jan Greenberg on children's books. Jordan discovered Greenberg's first manuscript while working as an editor. She and Greenberg share a love for art and writing.
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Art and Impact: Theme Connections

Within the Selection

Across Selections

Beyond the Selection